Residents’ Communication Skills Evaluation by OSCE: What Changes Should be done in Educational System?

Abstract

Background: The doubt in re-allocating some of current resources from holding communication skills workshops to others, we conducted this study to answer: What and how were the communication skills of residents in medical faculty? Were any changes needed to be done in educational system? Objectives: The aim of this study was to find out that, what and how were the communication skills of residents in medical faculty? Were any changes needed to be done in educational system? Materials and Methods: We designed one OSCE station with a standard patient to evaluate 53 Internal medicine residents' communication skills in 2010. We had videotaping with an undercover cam inside a monken to record the residents' interview with SP, by written permission of exam directors. We carefully and repeatedly reviewed the videotapes, analyzed the researcher made validated questionnaires' data using SPSS.16.We also gave detailed feed back to the residents. Results: The mean of Residents’ total score with a normal distribution was 23.62 ± 2.46. Independent- samples T-test [sig. (2-tailed: 0.441)] and Test statistics of Kruskal Wallis test (sig: 0.314) indicated none- significant difference in residents’ total score in different gender and ages. Post Hoc comparisons by using the method of Tukey HSD in One- Way ANOVA indicated that educational impacts of communication skills workshops are not lasting for up to one year. Conclusions: This study makes suggestions to address and overcome the still existing problem of residents’ poor communication skills.